Posted on 12/30/2014 6:33:18 PM PST by Daniel Clark
The Mystery “Our”: Whose values are the Dems talking about?
by Daniel Clark
The Democrats have been lecturing us a lot about “our values” lately. When they issued their so-called “CIA torture report,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein called the interrogation techniques “a stain on our values and on our history.” President Obama agreed that “these harsh methods” were “inconsistent with our values as a nation.”
While announcing that he was easing sanctions against Cuba, Obama repeatedly claimed that this new policy of “engagement” with the Castro brothers would promote “our values.” In a recent interview on CNN, he reiterated his promise to close the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, on the basis that, “It is contrary to our values” – whatever he imagines those to be.
Obama once criticized the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” that only enumerated restrictions on federal power, and did not empower the government to redistribute wealth. He said this as if he thought the omission was a mere oversight, and not the natural exclusion of something that’s antithetical to the very concept of America. Values our founders might have described as enterprise, industry and self-reliance are what Obama and his party often deride as a “you’re on your own society” in which people must “fend for themselves.”
The Democratic Party’s two most significant accomplishments of the past century have been to dismantle the family unit, and stomp the American work ethic into submission, and they did it through just the sort of redistributive system that Obama seems to think the men who wrote and ratified the Constitution simply neglected to establish. This system has diminished the role of genuine charity, and has instead corrupted millions of Americans into an existence characterized by ingratitude, unaccountability and sloth.
For all of Obama’s vacillations about whether or not he believes in American exceptionalism, he either fails or refuses to grasp its meaning. The United States is unlike any nation that had previously existed because it is based on the principle of government by the consent of the people – or, as Ronald Reagan put it, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” This principle is wholly incompatible with the “living Constitution” theory that is embraced by the Democrats and their judicial appointees.
To perceive the Constitution as “living” is to say that judges may deem the document’s meaning to have amended itself spontaneously, without any input from the elected representatives of the people. In other words, the self-appointed guardians of “our values” believe that the American people should have no role in shaping the fundamental law under which they must live.
If the Constitution can just evolve away from the plain meaning of its language, then the value it places on the rights of the people to life, liberty and property is no longer necessarily valid. It’s no wonder, then, that Obama wants to end our embargo against Cuba, since it was imposed in retaliation for that country’s expropriation of American-owned businesses. So the Castro government seized the property of U.S. citizens without compensation. And?
Both Obama and presumptive presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have argued that all successful enterprises are communal properties, of which the government is entitled to a cut. According to their “you didn’t build that” theory, if you employ people who have been educated in public schools, or if your business makes use of public roads, then the government has a preemptive right to your earnings. By their figuring, none of your income ever really becomes yours, other than through their benevolence.
If the Democrats were honest, they’d admit that they’ve discarded our values and embraced those of our ideological adversaries. They’d acknowledge that the whole concept of American values offends them, perhaps calling it “jingoistic” or “xenophobic” for good measure. They’d probably even blather about how supposedly unrealistic Leave It to Beaver is. Because they can never afford to be honest about who they are and what they believe, they’ve chosen instead to redefine “our values” by re-categorizing the “we” who hold them. Out goes James Madison, in comes Karl Marx.
Elected Democrats seldom if ever cite “our values” in order to celebrate America. Whenever they mention them, they do so only ironically, for the purpose of accusing America of hypocrisy. It’s well past time that America turned that accusation around on them.
-- Daniel Clark is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a web publication called The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press, where he also publishes a seasonal sports digest as The College Football Czar.
for the dems ... our means what was before elections and dems lost ... dems never learn ...
“Our” is a euphemism for a mix of the Moslem Brotherhood
(=al Qaeda) and violent Marxism dedicated to the
overthrow of the US Constitution.
The big IF.
Good point though.
Not mine.
In a nutshell, “our values” are those of the fringe lunatic socialist/communist leftists that they are doing their best to foist and impose on America, whether the rest of us like it or not.
An irony is that liberals will tell us you can’t force your values or morals on others. This comes up often in debates about abortion and homosexual marriage. We are good you can’t impose your values on others.
But liberals seek to impose liberal values, such as they are, on the rest of us. They lecture us about imposing values on people but when they are in power they impose their values on all of us.
For RATs, “our” = degenerates, criminals, moochers, communists, foreigners, union thugs, anarchists, illiterates, amoralists, abortionists, absent fathers, radical “educators”, islamists...I could go on.
This is the Clinton playbook. Speak as if you’re authoritatively representing the views of the masses. For Slick Willie, he was constantly invoking “the American people”, and them tiring of the mean Republicans harassing him about sex; and the American people wanting to “move on” - the same phrase that spawned MoveOn.org.
For 0bama, it’s “that’s not who we are”, or some other such nonsense. The next 2 years can’t pass quickly enough!
Christians call them the Seven Deadly Sins.
Just sayin'.
“Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.
...This is absolutely superlative journalism...Kudos
If you tell a lie enough times it becomes the truth
Pope Francis share Obama’s values
Francis is a very sui generis Pope. He embraces enthusiastically Marxist liberation theology. Francis strongly criticizes free enterprise while supporting Obama’s redistribution of wealth, a Marxist tenet that everywhere it have been imposed the result have been the general distribution of misery. He was the main artifice of Obama’s pact with the Cuban tortures to keep afloat the Cuban Stalinist tyranny. He is preparing an Encyclical defending the hoax of global warming. Francis proudly calls himself the Che Guevara of the Palestine people claiming that Islam is a peace loving religion even as thousands of Christians are being slaughtered by Muslims, some were crucified, others were burned alive or beheaded and their churches were set on fire.
After more than 55 years of violations of their human rights, is inconceivable that once again the Cuban people is betrayed by those most called to defend and demand their right to freedom and the respect for their human dignity.
“During those years, with the purpose of forcing us to abandon our religious beliefs and to demoralize us, the Cuban Communist indoctrinators repeatedly used the statements made by some representatives of the American Christian churches. Every time a pamphlet was published in U.S., every time a clergyman would write an article in support of Castro’s dictatorship, a translation would be given to us, and that was far worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger. Incomprehensible to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors.” Armando Valladares
Pope Francis negotiated and blessed a Faustian accord in which an apprentice of tyrant came to the rescue of the regimen of a genocide tyrant throwing under bus and condemning the Cuban people to eternal damnation. By this accord, the American taxpayers will keep afloat the Cuban government assuming the financing the Stalinist regime.
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